Skip to main content
Presented to you through Paradigm Publishing Services

Stanford University Press

book: Art's Assemblies
Book Ahead of Publication

Art's Assemblies

Political Aesthetics in Transatlantic Dialogue
Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2026

About this book

Art's Assemblies presents a new political aesthetics for the present. Claudia Breger makes a case for art's power to act politically in significant, manifold ways by reconnecting twenty-first-century philosophical frameworks to the more boldly political aesthetics of European modernisms, particularly as developed in response to historical fascism. Thus, the book develops dialogues between recent work in actor-network-theory, radical Black thought, neo-marxism, affect, and queer studies, and the twentieth-century tradition of critical theory, with literature, film, TV, and art installation examples included. As acts of political alignment as well as imaginative prefiguration, "art's assemblies" bring together heterogeneous elements and actions in (polyphonic) "political concert." This includes how artworks "track" and "trace" pieces of real-world materials even in fantastic contexts; how they work through unfinished histories of violence and dehumanization by "animating" archival documents; how they "fabulate" different historical accounts without engaging in the "forging" actions of fake news; and how they counter the accumulated nightmares surrounding us through practices of "dreaming" interwoven with actions of "drafting" or "demanding." In this challenging political moment, Breger's work speaks across disciplines to articulate a new vision of how art can engage with the world—and imagine different futures.

Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook planned publication:
October 27, 2026
eBook ISBN:
9781503649187
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
272
Downloaded on 27.4.2026 from https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/isbn/9781503649187/html?lang=en
Scroll to top button